The certainty that fingerprints exist – all but invisible and yet sufficiently recoverable to convict a man of any crime from theft to murder – provided an analogy that allowed Dylan more easily to believe that with their very touch, people might leave behind something more peculiar but every bit as real as natural oils impressed with the patterns of skin ridges.
The rose-decorated runner up the center of the stairs appeared to be as worn as the similar carpet in the lower hall. The pattern here looked bolder, featuring fewer flowers and more brambles, as though to signify that station by station in this journey, Dylan’s task was growing thornier.
Ascending although reason could present no argument to ascend, he slid his right hand along the banister. Lingering traces of the malevolent entity flared against his palm and sparked against his fingertips, but fireflies no longer swarmed through his head. The internal electrical sizzle had been silenced as completely as his convulsing tongue had been stilled by the time that he’d touched the beer can in the kitchen. He had adjusted to this uncanny experience, and neither his mind nor his body any longer offered resistance to these currents of supernatural sensation.
* * *
Even unknown intruders and a perception of impending violence could not long stifle the white-haired woman’s natural amiableness, which had no doubt been enhanced with motivational steroids during training provided by the fast-food franchise for which she worked. Worry twitched into a fragile smile, and she offered one hand to be shaken even though it was doing a fine job of shaking itself. ‘I’m Marjorie, dear. What’s your name?’
Jilly would have gone into the downstairs hall in search of Dylan if her only responsibility had been Shepherd, but Dylan had left her with a second, this woman. She didn’t want to leave Shep alone in the SUV much longer, and if she left Marjorie alone within reach of a telephone, more small-town cops would be milling around this place than you’d find at a Mayberry RFD convention.
Besides, Dylan had told Marjorie to get out of the house because she wasn’t safe here, but the old girl seemed to have lived nearly seventy years while remaining a naif incapable of recognizing peril even when the wickedly gleaming edge of it was descending toward her neck. If Jilly didn’t get her out of here, Marjorie might remain in the kitchen, vaguely concerned but not alarmed, even if a plague of ravenous locusts swarmed out of the pantry and gouts of molten lava erupted from the sink drain.
‘I’m Marjorie,’ she repeated, her fragile smile trembling like a crescent of froth that might dissolve back into the pool of worry that had flooded her features. Still extending her hand, she clearly expected a name in return – a name that she would give to the cops later when, inevitably, she eventually summoned them.
Putting an arm around Marjorie’s shoulders, encouraging her toward the back door, Jilly said, ‘Sweetie, you can just call me Chicken-sandwich-French-fries-root-beer. ‘Chicky’ for short.’
* * *
Each further contact with the spoor on the banister suggested that the person whose trail Dylan followed was more malevolent than the previous trace had revealed. By the time that he turned at the landing and climbed the second flight into the gloom at the top of the stairs, he understood that in the upper rooms waited an adversary who could be vanquished not by a mere artist lacking any firsthand experience of violence, but by no less than a dragon slayer.
Hardly more than a minute ago, downstairs, when he had seen the woman alive but also as she might eventually appear in the aftermath of murder, he had felt undiluted terror for the first time slither into him. Now it tightened its serpent coils around his spine.
‘Please,’ Dylan whispered, as though he still believed that he stood here in the iron control of – and at the mercy of – an unknown external force. ‘Please,’ he repeated, as though it were not becoming manifestly clear that this sixth sense had been conferred upon him – or cursed upon him – by whatever elixir the syringe contained, and as though it were not equally clear that he continued on this dangerous course utterly without coercion. His whispered please could rightly be directed toward no one but himself. He was driven by motives that he could not understand, but they were nonetheless his motives and his alone.